


Leave the Empty Chairs

by Ash_Cassidy97



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Alex Summers, BAMF Charles, BAMF Scott Summers, Charles and Erik need to use their words, Charles is a Professor, Charles will get his kids an education, Erik has Issues, Erik is Crushing Harder than a 12-year Old Girl, Erik is a Father, Gen, Honestly Charles What Are You Thinking, Pietro Maximoff Feels, Raven is such a liar, Scott's parents sucked, still dead though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 18:01:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7694098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ash_Cassidy97/pseuds/Ash_Cassidy97
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens after, the time between when Erik left and when he came back, what happens between Peter realizing this was not a game and knowing they could not lose.</p>
<p>Mostly an introspection on why Peter listens to music and when he stops. Scott is in this a lot because he stole my heart with Spanish.</p>
<p>AKA known as how Charles totally got his kids integrated into normal high school with very little drama. not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leave the Empty Chairs

 

Peter ran into Cairo with a rock song playing in his head because this wasn't war. It wasn't. It was just a game, like PAC-Man. The four horse men were ghosts and it was just a game. The mansion was just a game too. He saved the fish and the dog and everyone inside that house except for Alex Summers.

 

His leg broke, caught up in sand and he was landlocked for the first time in his life. It felt like Kindergarten all over, _don't run, Pietro_. Hank took him to the hospital, lying about all his medically unimportant details. Xavier was checked in under his own name but Jean Grey sat next to him. Erik waited in the car because he would not go into a place of healing, he could not meet those children in a hospital he had nearly killed.

 

Hank sat next to Peter. The doc was rough, hurried, and not eager enough with the pain management side of the operation. Hank ,despite being Hank, was not an actual medical man, but he kept a steady hand on Peter.

 

Peter sat there. Numb. His dad was Erik Lencher and they had just saved the fucking world. Hank made a kind reference to video games and Peter barely swiped the trash in time.

 

“Keep the cast dry. 5 weeks.” The doctor cast an eye over Peter's vomiting form. “May experience nausea.”

 

Peter had a battered pair of trip sticks, Hank McCoy, and that had to be enough.

 

They all took separate flights back to New York. The house was gone, demolished. It laid in conquered rubble on the ground. Xavier was confined to a bed against his arguments and irritability, and Erik was already talking about leaving. They all slept out on the front lawn for the first few weeks.

 

Some of the kids couldn't go home. Peter's mom didn't want him home. _It's not safe,_ she told him. Peter knew he should go home to his mom and Wanda anyway because he'd always been the first defense. But the kids were all there, laying around, trying to find out why life was no longer a game. They had the look in their eyes, the look they all had. Magda was a proven badass and these kids didn't have any of that going for them.

 

Jean Grey walked around like she was a ghost but she fucking knew it and owned it. No fear. She could kill everybody in the camp and had to just chill with it. It took a lot more effort on some days, mostly everyday.

 

Raven walked around like she was a phantom. She was better with younger kids, those that didn't know why she could be scary. She did pretty tricks with her hair and face and learned how to coax a laugh from the shyest kids. She learned to walk like she'd never felt villianfied. No, that wasn't true. She had. She'd been hunted and she'd been hunted wrongly. She learned to walk like she was not a crime and she didn't need to be.

 

Peter nearly talked to Raven after Cairo about what she said on the plane. She was a terrible liar, who built up these walls of expectations. Most of Xavier's were nice kids, they'd gone to school and Xavier had set them on the path of the righteous. They'd lived in a house where their professor knew everything. Peter had been at it longer. _No, he hadn't stolen the milk, it just go there. No, he hadn't meant to be out all night. Yes, he liked his eighth new school. Yes, he liked being known as Peter because he knew they had to fit in more. He didn't miss having a dad._

 

Raven was a shitty liar but she never had much practice until Erik. Peter was a hyperactive kid who could run around killing people if he wanted; he was used to playing the comedic relief.

 

It wasn't a game and they were all scared but younger kids counted on older kids to know what to do. There wasn't anybody else left.

 

Peter dew out a sharpie and passed it to a little boy who'd been crying all week. “I bet you can't draw a hotdog.”

 

“What do I get?”

 

“My dessert tonight.”

 

Peter let them doodle all over, letting them huddle, wrapped them up in his bitter edges and caring, and Xavier woke up from the fucking loudest nap of the century. Erik was leaving the next day because it was Erik and Charles and that was what they did. Charles could barely sit up and Erik was already half-way out the door. Peter gimped around to the best of his availability. He kept an eye on Hank. Peter kept an eye on everybody.

 

“What are you going to do?” Charles asked, wheeling up to him.

 

“I think I'll stay around for a bit.” God knows they'd all be dead if he hadn't been a curious fucker and stopped by on a whim.

 

Jean followed around after Erik. They could both destroy the world without even thinking about it. Erik seemed confused that several of the kids looked up to him. Peter kept his distance. Erik looked so broken, so dead, lost without a cause. He was trying to mourn, trying for what must be the first time in his life to face grief without anger. And Jean was learning how to not be afraid for the first time in her life.

 

Scott kept looking to his side, expecting his brother to be there to take charge. He found a huddle of little kids behind him. He couldn't see their faces, what color their eyes were. Everything was colored blood-red. He didn't dwell in grief. He worked, getting blisters for the first time in his life, fixing what he could fix, the small amount. He missed his brother's funeral because Teddy from the tent next to his was scared and crying and Alex would've understood. Alex would've yelled at him for leaving a kid behind.

 

Alex went to jail when he was fourteen. His parents, worried out of their minds, wouldn't visit. Scott brought his Spanish homework to the window and juggled the phone and pencil. He looked tiny and lonely to the guards and they let the kid in. Scott wore desperation and fear and his kid brother kept coming anyway.

 

Alex followed Charles because Scott still brought his Spanish, even though he was close to being fluent. Darwin had the same look in his eyes as Scott. Alex survived. He went home, hugged Scott and remained indifferent to his parents. He got them, he did. But they would never understand him, never know his battleground.

 

Scott sat across from his brother because his house was invaded by a ghost and his parents never realized that Alex was scared. Scott sat across from him, learning a new language, praying that maybe another tongue would open up a door. Scott learned a few new swears and how to talk to his brother through a ten foot wide piece of glass.

 

Alex got drafted and Scott got a 5 on the AP Spanish exam. Alex went to sleep every night in a swamp and Scott learned how to laugh like he wasn't so afraid. They both gave up on their parents' soft and well-cultured expressions of love. He saw the same desperation in Charles, Erik, Peter, and all of the other kids. He saw the same look in soldiers who were not much older that he'd seen in Alex's face, and thought no where is safe, not from me, not for me.

 

And Scott got letters, tucked them under his pillow. He kept them in Xavier's Camp for Children and prayed this was a war they could survive.

 

“Erik,” Charles said slowly, gently. Peter popped his gum loudly, returning to the conversation. “would be happy to have a son, he would be proud.”

 

“No,” Peter said firmly. “We're not playing that game, the game of Erik could one day be a model citizen. I watched him try to kill every human because his family was killed and no.”

 

“Peter, he, his only experience with love is that people leave him. Sometimes we build walls to see who will tear them down.”

 

“Yeah, or he's a dick, professor,” Peter added the title as an afterthought. “I am not responsible for him.”

 

Charles grimaced but nodded. The truth of it was that Erik could be imprisoned. He could spend his days in plastic. But somebody would break him out, even for the right reasons, and what prison does to a man is entirely too elusive.

 

Peter never got why his mom left his dad without telling him. He never got it until about ten years ago.

 

Peter didn't talk fast. Everybody else talked slow, so slow. He played it fast and hard because that was his normal speed, and he didn't really need a dad, really. He was-fuck-too old to be crying for an old man.

 

They were all crying out for somebody in those days. Scott wished for his brother, Jean for anybody who truly understood her, Storm for her parents to come back, Peter for his father to grieve, Erik for his family, Charles for Erik to stay just once, and all of them had something to wake them up on those dark nights. They didn't all get answered.

 

Alex was dead. Jean was less alone than she had ever been but she was alone. Storm had a new family to barely hold her up. Peter had kids running around under his foot. Erik left because that was Erik did best. And Charles-Charles had what he always had-voices.

 

He lied to himself on the worst nights, saying it was good enough. On the darkest, he pretended he believed himself.

 

Erik left. Peter stayed because his little sister levitated things without trying to, and he wanted a world where she would never stop blasting pop music in her head, where her magic was not a death-sentence.

 

The house got repaired, but none of the teachers without powers came back. Many of those with didn't either. Charles but his lip and wrote steely missives in his neatest handwriting to the local schools to get his children in, because they would have an education, they would have a chance. Most refused, but a few replied because these were still _children_ and Charles hadn't gotten a Doctorate for naught.

 

One day, a School for Gifted Youngsters would have about a hundred kids in its halls, running past and attempting to jump off banisters with a staff to support them. The day before the fall term began, Charles had thirty children and four teachers, including himself.

 

The first day, the kids walked in like the public school was a war-zone. Jean had her hair all done up in tight braids, pinned up. Scott wore his leather jacket and shades and a smirk across his face; he gripped Lilly and Teddy's hands tightly. Kurt had a device on to hide and all he could think was Raven's words to him, _we don't have to hide_. It was xenophobia, assholeness, that slivers through mouths and lives in children. This was their war-ground.

 

Someday, Scott thought as he broke up another fistfight, I must really look up how Steve Rogers got through it all. One day, Scott would meet Steve Rogers and feel nothing but kindness in the hands that helped him from the rubble-strewn sidewalk. But it was not that day. This day, Scott would go home with bloody knuckles and take the professor's lectures on how he was supposed to be better than others. He would tape up his hands and go to school the next day because Lily could short out the hair-dryer in the bathroom and she liked unicorns and her gift was not freedom.

 

Peter stayed and helped teach the younger ones. The Elementary school was deemed too dangerous for them. Everyone picked up a new language. Peter would murmur French and Roma to the kids when they woke from nightmares. He picked up Arabic phrases from Storm and Spanish poems from Scott. He tapped Scott's hands up every night and told him tricks on how to block.

 

Erik came back a year later. Peter had stayed.

 

“Hi,” Peter said, sticking out his hand. He'd watched the news reports every day. Erik hadn't killed anybody for a year. It had to be good enough. Peter hadn't stolen anything (much) in a year. “I'm Peter Maximoff. I-you had sex with my mom, you did the do, and nine months, later she had me. It doesn't make me your son, it doesn't make you my dad, but we should-I don't know-be on a first name basis?”

 

“Hi, I'm Erik Lencher,” Erik murmured shyly. He shook the hand. “I will be happy to know you in any way you would let me. Not that like that you, perv,” he added at Peter's look. Peter snorted and Erik smiled.

 

It was not a game. It was not to be won with songs in his head and running away. It could not be lost.

 

It had to be enough.

 

On the good nights, Peter and the rest believed that. On the bad ones, they huddled around the fire pit and sang show tunes at the top of their voices. Charles had a particular catchy voice, by which he could not sing anything past the 50s. And Peter thought Charles' first crush was probably Steve Rogers for how often he sang _Man with a Plan_. Well, they are only human.

 

**Author's Note:**

> title is from the song "Wild Things" by Alessia Cara
> 
> I wasn't sad about Alex Summers and then Scott made me sad, like he alone made me cry. And then I did Shakespeare in Love and King's Speech. I cried a lot this week guys. Granted, this took four but hey, I tried. I don't know why Scott became a badass in this, but he should. This was originally a peter character study. It mutated. 
> 
> I'm going to the special place.


End file.
